Creating a personal brand is rapidly becoming a necessity: both employers and customers are choosing whom they work with on the basis of a person’s personal brand just as much as their other qualifications. But developing your personal brand might not be as simple as you might hope: it’s not just a matter of buying a domain name and putting together a business card. Developing and managing your personal brand requires a unique combination of skill, knowledge, discipline, self-perspective, future-oriented thinking, and tools & techniques in order to make YOU standout from the rest of humanity. Fortunately, there a number of personal branding experts out there who can walk you through the whole process of branding YOU and relieve you of some of the burdensome labor associated with the process, such as putting together an online portfolio. While finding a personal branding consultant that fits your needs might take a bit of work, this list of 50 experts should make your search a little easier.

William Arruda (website, blog)
William literally wrote the book on building a personal brand to advance your career — Career Distinction: Stand Out By Building Your Brand — with his co-author Kirsten Dixon. William has worked with an amazing list of clients, including Disney, Microsoft, and American Express; he also works with up-and-coming brands as well.

Kirsten Dixson (blog)
Kirsten is an online identity expert and co-authored Career Distinction with William Arruda. She specializes in customized personal branding approaches and offers options for building online presences. Kirsten is one of the world’s first to earn the Reach Certified Personal Branding Strategist certification, a program that she now facilitates in addition to Reach’s online identity certification program that she conceived.

Melissa Cassera (website, blog)
Melissa worked in public relations in a variety of industries before launching her own firm, Cassera Communications. In addition to consulting on personal branding, she offers coaching that allows clients to learn how to promote themselves as well as help with social media elements.

Lauren Still (website, blog)
Lauren is a certified personal life and career coach. While Lauren works with professionals looking to develop their careers, her talent is coaching professional women who are also balancing families and their own needs.

Anna Farmery (website, blog)
Anna offers advice on social media strategies and using social media to create brands. In addition to her consulting, Anna’s blog and podcast are very successful and have been nominated for numerous awards.

Hajj Flemings (website, blog)
Hajj’s book, The Brand YU Life, covers branding in some depth. He also teaches personal brand management at Michigan Technological University, as well as speaking regularly about brand management.

Miriam Salpeter (website)
Miriam offers a tiered approach to her consulting services: most of her efforts are focused on career coaching, but she does include personal brand consulting as part of her services — including some social media work. Miriam has over ten years of career coaching experience.

Kim Batson (website)
Kim, in addition to her career coaching, provides consulting on creating the collateral materials necessary for a good brand. She specializes in working with technology professionals, to the point that Kim is called “The CIO’s Coach.”

David Sandusky (website)
David Sandusky helps clients develop a personal brand through the use of a web-based tool called Personal Board of Advisors, which can help focus growth in a particular direction. He also provides marketing strategies for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Dan Janal (website, blog)
Dan has over 20 years of PR experience and was on the PR team that launched AOL. He offers both consulting and coaching services, and offers a free five-minute consultation to those interested in building their personal brands.

Maureen Cullen (website)
Maureen offers a variety of coaching venues, including individual coaching and workshops. She focuses primarily in career fulfillment and transition coaching and holds a wide variety of career coaching credentials.

Anthony Fisher (website, blog)
In addition to providing standard personal brand development services, Anthony also helps build the materials necessary to promote a person’s brand. With a design background, Anthony is capable of building websites and other key elements of a personal brand. Anthony’s clients include a variety of entrepreneurs, as well as artists, evangelists, and speakers.

Louise Mowbray (website, blog)
Louise has over 17 years of branding experience in the finance, technology, and luxury-lifestyle sectors. She provides personal branding services to clients looking to build upon their current careers with control of their personal brands.

Vivian VanLier (website)
Vivian provides career coaching and personal brand consulting services. Among Vivian’s specialties are working with Baby Boomers, as well as her well-known resume writing skills. Her resumes have been published in more than 30 books.

Wendy Terwelp (website, blog)
Wendy provides personal branding and coaching for entrepreneurs and business owners. She also provides networking advice and uses her background as a recruiter to advise clients on career issues.

Louise Kursmark (website, blog)
Louise’s background includes 26 years of resume writing and other outplacement services. She can offer advice on branding yourself during a career search — and help make that search a success.

Abby Locke (website, blog)
Abby has created personal brand solutions for a variety of executives and corporate leaders. She’s a Certified Personal Branding Strategist and can help build an online presence.

Tara Kachaturoff (website)
Tara is Michigan’s first Reach Certified Personal Brand Strategist as well as a Certified Online Identity Strategist. She is the producer and host of Michigan Entrepreneur, a weekly television talk show which features Michigan entrepreneurs and organizations that support entrepreneurship. Tara can provide several levels on services to help clients create an online presence, as well as providing personal brand consulting.

Dan Schawbel (website, blog)
Dan’s specialty is personal branding for members of Generation Y. He’s especially well known for his blog on personal branding, along with his book, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success.

Megan Fitzgerald (website, blog)
Megan works with expats and globally-minded professionals and entrepreneurs seeking a career or business that fits who they are and their international lifestyle.

Sally Witzky (website, blog)
Sally has transitioned from marketing such clients as Mercedes-Benz to helping clients build their own brands. In addition to her personal brand consulting, Sally also offers coaching for speaking and online brands.

Luke Harvey-Palmer (website, blog)
Luke goes a step beyond helping clients develop their personal brand. He helps them manage their brands with an eye to the long-term. He provides in-depth information about social media and its uses for personal branding.

Shayna Gaspard (website)
Shayna uses the skills she developed while working in Deloitte’s Strategy & Operations practice. She focuses on creating an overall personal brand strategy for her clients and helping them position themselves to make better use of their own brands.

Maria Elena Duron (website, blog)
Maria has made a specialty of coaching her clients through the difficulties of setting up an online presence and managing brand and reputation across many networks. She regularly works with executives and entrepreneurs looking to create a balanced approach to their own brands.

Phil Gerbyshak (blog)
Phil uses social marketing to promote personal brands. In addition to coaching clients through a wide variety of new media, Phil also speaks on a regular basis to larger groups.

Jennifer Rushton (website)
While Jennifer focuses on creating excellent resumes, she also provides personal branding services to help her clients get the total package. She offers a variety of coaching programs.

Bernadette Martin (website)
Bernadette provides a variety of personal brand management services and produces the Visibility Branding Webinar Series, which explores career development and personal branding. She works with international clients routinely and can provide cross-cultural branding strategies.

Cindy Kraft (website, blog)
Cindy’s expertise is in providing personal branding strategies, as well as career coaching for corporate finance and banking executives. She provides branding help to position clients through new media, as well as through more traditional methods.

Krishna De (website, blog)
Krishna is known as Ireland’s leading personal branding strategist. She works with executives to craft distinctive personal brands, and provides consulting services regarding social media.

Nancy Branton (website)
Nancy provides career and branding coaching starting from initial assessments all the way through the development process. She has over 30 years of experience in human resources and talent management.

Walter Akana (website)
Walter takes a holistic approach to helping clients who are dissatisfied with their current position. He helps clients find more direction in their careers and lives and build a personal branding strategy.

Liz Lynch (website, blog)
Liz’s book Smart Networking is just recently out: it reflects her talents in helping clients build a great network and mass-following both online and in-person. Liz provides several levels of coaching.

Stacia Williams (website, blog)
Stacia uses her image consulting skills to help clients manage every aspect of their personal brands. She works with a wide variety of clients, including executives, entrepreneurs, and politicians.

Catherine Kaputa (website, blog)
Catherine provides her clients with the tools to think of themselves as products, helping to create brands for both professionals and entrepreneurs. Catherine has a book due out in 2009 focusing on how women, in particular, can brand themselves effectively.

Diana Jennings (website, blog)
Diana works with her clients to not only develop their personal brands but also to match their outward appearance to that brand. Her personal brand coaching includes personal style development, wardrobe consultations, and other resources to tweak a client’s presentation.

Susan Guarneri (website, blog)
Susan is known as the Career Assessment Goddess because of her ability to use assessments to help clients discover and clarify what they want from their careers. Susan can then use that information to help her clients build their personal brands.

Riham El-Hawary (website)
Riham is the leading expert on personal branding development in the Middle East. She works primarily with professionals in the area, offering a variety of consulting services to create personal brands for her clients.

Deb Dib (website, blog)
Deb works primarily with executives and limits herself to just 24 clients per year. She walks her clients through every step of the personal branding process, along with providing other career management services.

Timothy O’Brien (website)
Timothy coaches executives, professionals, and entrepreneurs in his “Rainmaker U.” program, enabling them to position themselves with personal brands far beyond those of their competitors. Graduates of Timothy’s program have won numerous awards, as well as succeeded on a professional level.

Peter Montoya (website)
Peter provides personal branding services, along with other coaching and marketing services, to financial professionals. He has limited his clientele to just the financial services industry, but he has perfected personal branding techniques for that type of professional.

Karen McSteen (website)
Karen’s past experience includes a stint as AOL’s Senior Vice President of Brand Strategy as well as Brand Vice President at Marriott International. She has turned over 25 years of brand management experience into an opportunity for clients to learn how to manage their brands from the best.

Wendy Newman (website)
Wendy has over twenty years of marketing and branding experience, working for such companies as Starbucks. She provides personal branding services to high-profile professionals, focusing on authenticity.

Victoria Scott (website)
Victoria offers image consulting services to help create a personal style and visual brand. Victoria provides information about every aspect of your appearance, even down to skincare.

Rosemary Davies-Janes (website)
Rosemary trained as a life coach and spent 15 years in marketing. She has combined her backgrounds to offer personal branding services that allow clients to define their me brands and build upon that definition.

Gerry Visca (website)
Gerry’s “Red Chair” personal coaching program provides clients with an opportunity to focus on their personal brands. The four-week program caters to entrepreneurs and includes creating a personal plan that clients can put into play.

Chandlee Bryan (website, blog)
Chandlee’s career coaching experience includes time spent as the Director of Career Services at Dartmouth College’s engineering school. Personal branding is one of several services she offers as part of her career coaching.

Jan Melnik (website, blog)
As part of the career transition resources she offers, Jan provides clients online identity management. She particularly focuses on creating an online presence that will appear when prospective employers search for you.

Billie Sucher (website, blog)
Billie’s more than 20 years of career coaching experience allows her to work with clients to develop a personal brand that will offer significant advantages during a career transition. She has worked with entry-level to executive-level clients to create personal brands.

Thursday has been blogging about a variety of subjects for over six years. She has written extensively about productivity and is always looking for another way to make life easier. Also she has helped the writing service essaybasics.com to organize their work life.

Nice work, and great to see the summary of Personal Branding mavens here on the one page! There are some super ‘coaches’ here I have heard of, and some new ones, so I look forward to getting to know them a little better. You could almost start your own little personal brand coach networking programme! I look forward to seeing your follow up material…

Luke, thanks for the comment. Thursday put together an amazing list of personal branding specialists. I’m sure there are plenty more out there worth mentioning.

I think you’ll like the post series that Thursday and I are going to publish over the next few months; it should give people interested in acquiring the services of a personal branding expert a complete “buyer’s” roadmap.

Great list. This is a very valuable resource that will allow people the opportunity to get a complete view of personal branding. It is an honor to be include with such great thought leaders in the personal branding space.

Thank you so much for the list and the mention! I’m am so humbled and honored to be amongst so many leaders in the industry.

It’s always a delight to be recognized for something that is your passion and joy. If I can assist you in any of your endeavors, please let me know.

An attorney I worked with had created a great list of questions to ask a personal advisor, that I think would apply for anyone in the coaching or personal service profession. Let me know if that would be helpful for your future articles!

Thank you very much for the opportunity to be included with many of the personal brand specialists and coaches you have listed. I believe your list will be a great resource for individuals who are looking for change and will serve as a catalyst to bring awareness to the wonderful experience of Personal Branding.

What an inspirational list – thank you for including me and for your email, which I will answer in greater detail.

Most of us have forged a way forward in personal brand coaching out of a passion for the subject – and the deeply compelling results. There was little in the way of global standards or even a broad understanding when I first started out and it is great to see so many talented people now working in this field.

Thanks for the mention and great company to be in. As you go through the list it’s just fantastic to see the variety of help out there – one great benefit to those looking to work with a personal brand specialist is there is probably one out there that will fit your needs closely.

When I started in personal branding there was probably not even 50 in the world – now there is a top 50 – pretty cool.

I am honored to be included on this list of people creating confident and relevant personal brand strategies. To see my partner, Maria Elena Duron, with the Personal Board of Advisors system is Awesome! She is true talent and a great person – thanks for the list of resources!

Thank you very much for the mention, and for supporting the power of personal branding!

I’m honored to be in such a fine group, and especially proud to have been trained by William Arruda of Reach as one of the first Certified Personal Branding Strategists over 4 years ago.

The Reach branding process and the “360 Reach” assessment have made an enormous difference in my clients’ success and career/personal satisfaction. I can’t imaging managing a career without personal branding as the foundation!

Thanks for including me this in this list – I am honored to be listed amongst so many great professionals.

I work with internationally minded professionals and expats around the world. I believe that no matter where you are located, no matter where you are looking for a job or to market your services, personal branding is the key to your success.

It is important for people to understand that today you must attend to your personal brand both online and offline if you want to succeed. Employers, decision makers and consumers are using both traditional career and marketing documentation as well as google searches to collect information to make their hiring and purchasing decisions.

So it is in everyone’s interest to consider consulting a personal branding professional to make sure that the messaging both online and off supports their long term professional and business goals.

Thanks again for spreading the word about the importance of personal branding for professional success.

What a wonderful service to provide your readers! I am humbled to be included in this illustrious group of people and I really appreciate the time and effort you took to assemble the list.

Personal branding and online identity management are now mainstream elements to job search success and empowered career management. As a National Certified Career Counselor and specialist in career assessments, including the 360Reach personal branding assessment, and personal branding and online identity management coaching in my “toolbox” was a no-brainer!

Not only is it fantastic to be included on this list, but even more gratifying to see so many of my web development clients and those whom I’ve trained in the Reach Personal Branding Certification Programs on this list! Congratulations to my colleagues!

Great List! It’s often difficult for a coaching client to find a resource encompassing all elements of personal branding. Kudos to you for compiling.

If I may suggest an addition to the list: Association of Image Consultants International. http://aici.org/ A branding resource list isn’t complete without mention of the leading worldwide association for personal and corporate image professionals.

Thank you for the mention. I am humbled and flattered to be included in such good company.

Although I’ve been helping young professionals develop their own personal brands for over a decade, I am a relative newcomer to private practice and would like to send a special shout-out to Deb Dib and Miriam Salpeter for their collegial support and encouragement.

In my opinion, successful job searches frequently hinge on the job seeker’s ability to articulate two things: first, an understanding of the position they seek and, secondly, the skills they bring to it. As I see it, personal branding consultants can help clients develop clarity around this issue. Thanks for providing a “go-to” list of consultants for this tight economy!

Wow! This is amazing…I am thrilled, honored, and humbled to be included in such a prestigious list of 50 branding professionals! Congratulations to all! Wishing you the best with your new post series; with my sincere thanks and appreciation!

Thanks for the mention (like so many others I am truly honored) and for putting together a great and diverse list of resources for people looking to either understand more about personal branding, or start to find a consultant who will help them achieve great things.

The exciting part to me is that your post will undoubtedly raise awareness and interest in the subject. We all know what personal branding can do for a career or a business, but so many people have not yet realized the potential. Kudos.

When I founded my Personal Brand Agency, MIBOSO back in 1998, the term “branding” was invariably linked to cows and hot irons in most people’s minds. Today the concept is gaining a greater understanding, though there is still a significant level of confusion between brand visuals (logos, colors, graphics, etc) and what makes up the heart of a personal brand (values, strengths, ideals, etc.)

So I appreciate that in this post, Thursday Bram is endeavoring to grow a more accurate understanding of personal branding.

And I’ll admit that I am curious. Thursday – can you tell me what criteria you used to identify the “top 50″ personal brand consultants?

@Rosemary: This isn’t a top-50 list. That would require a systematic apples-to-apples comparison against some set evaluation criteria and a system for scoring and ranking. It’s a list of 50 reputable personal branding consultants that we could find. In this post series, I don’t plan to do any ranking, although I do plan to show buyers how to conduct their own and to pick one that will meet their personal career needs.

As a personal brand strategist and image consultant, I am often asked, what’s the difference between personal branding and image? The words image and brand are often used interchangeably when describing how people are presenting themselves. In fact they are distinctly different. One’s image is their visual representation and includes how they speak and act. A brand is the “experience” the individual represents. In other words, one’s image is only a subset of the total that communicates their personal brand.

A Personal Brand Strategist takes the work of an Image Consultant to a much broader and deeper level. In much the same way an image consultant analyses their client’s needs, the brand strategist helps the client uncover their authentic self, coaches and provides a path to achieve their goals. Working with an Image Consultant insures that their brand is accurately being communicated through the manner in which they dress, speak and behave.

I believe that Personal Branding is the intentional pursuit of gaining knowledge of ones strengths, abilities and talents. Attaining clarity of who you are, where you are going and delivering a message of mastery that will paint a mental picture of your true self to your existing and prospective audience.” In other words, it’s about finding out what you do well, staying within your strength zones and giving voice to the world about your mission, calling or purpose in life.

Personal Branding is an inside-out experience that will transform the way you think about yourself, your approach in working with others and taking the necessary steps to execute your day-to-day actions with focus and intention. It’s about finding fulfillment with your natural and self-sustained abilities; giving expression to them and showcasing them to an audience that seeks the value that you offer.”

The reason why an individual would hire a personal brand coach is because they have a desire to become the person they know they can be. They realize they need direction and assistance from someone outside their environment of influence to reveal the potential they have inside. As with any good coach, a personal brand coach is to give direction, communicate effectively, motivate excellently, transfer knowledge efficiently and inspire his student to embrace the process for attaining success. A coaches focus is the “NOW” and the “FUTURE”. He/she gives an outline for success, prepares the student to accept the challenges along the way and teaches how to have an attitude of perseverance in order to reach the destination.

So how does an individual determine which expert will best serve their needs? It’s simple. I believe that personal brand coaches/consultants/strategists or whatever we call them need to have successfully branded themselves. Branding is a process. A brand is created through time (not overnight). In other words, a brand must be trusted. To trust someone or something means it is steadfast, unshakeable and predictable. It’s been around for a while. In my humble opinion, to be a personal brand coach is more than having a degree, a certificate or titles behind one’s name, (although it may be important in some arenas) but it’s about what the individual brings to the table (through life’s experiences) and how the coach inspires his client to become the best they can can be and at the same time provide the student with resources and ideas to effectively put them into a position for success.

As an experienced college professor, Education Technology specialist, Olympic caliber athlete/coach, professional speaker, business owner and award-winning graphic/web designer, my life’s experiences have prepared me for what I’ve become and what I do today. To coach is a passion that I have and I absolutely enjoy helping others reach their potential by giving them what they need to identify their strengths and at the same time, provide them the creative visual brand elements to effectively market themselves with great expectation and confidence.

Checking back in to see how this is going. I had no idea there were so many personal branding coaches/consultants. Thanks for doing this and let’s keep it going! It’s nice to see the expansion of a much-needed industry – especially these days! I remember when I had to spell out for people what I did for a living! I’m delighted to be a part of this group!

You missed one of the big names in the business. Mike Myatt at N2growth is a true thought leader in the space and should have been mentioned on your list. Since reading his book and blog I have become a big fan.

This is quite a list. I agree that a brand is much more than a website or a logo. I’ve had business owners ask me to design a logo and I find myself saying “I don’t do logos. I do brands.” Thanks for the great resource.
Dana